Govt Plans To Graft 500,000 Wild Olive Trees

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 26th Jul, 2022 ) :In a bid to reduce reliance on costly imported edible oil as well as to promote indigenous output of oil seeds in the country, the government has embarked upon a project to encourage olive cultivation across the potential areas with grafting of wild olive trees spread over thousands of hectares.

In this regard the government has launched a pilot project of wild olive trees grafting in different areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, erstwhile FATA, Balochistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Potohar Region to exploit huge existing potential of olive cultivation, said Dr Ahmad Tariq National Project Director of Olive Cultivation.

Talking to APP here on Tuesday, he said that initially, grafting would be done over 0.5 million wild olive trees in above mentioned areas, besides providing essential training to farmers of these areas to enhance their farm income.

Besides, the government in collaboration with Italian Government has also initiated Olive Culture Project to improve the regulatory framework, quality of locally produced products to encourage its output as well as to exports.

He said that under the project, the Italian experts were providing special training to promote olive cultivation, besides oil extraction fulfilling the international standards and quality, adding that by meeting these standards, locally produced olive oil would get international recognition and enhance its exports.

Dr Tariq said that work on olive value chain and value addition was also gaining momentum in the country and different projects were completed with public-private partnership to enhance the income of local farmers, particularly small scale growers across the country.

He said so far, olive cultivation was completed over 40,000 hectares and it was gaining momentum due to its demand locally as well its exports scope, adding that promotion in olive production would also help to address the health hazards by ensuring the supply of quality edible oil to domestic consumption.

It may be recalled here that country imported about 2.802 million tons of palm oil costing $3.549 billion to tackle with local needs, besides importing over 143,539 metric tons of soyabean oil valuing $197.156 million during fiscal year 2022 as compared the imports of the corresponding period of last year.